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About this project

If Penn State football spent 2012 surviving, they used 2013 emerging from the
storm.

For fans, for a time, all we could do was put as much flesh as possible
between the world and our eyes, and hope to ride it out. When we opened them
again, we found a depth chart at a disadvantage and a gameplan that requires
knowledge of dice.

Who are we now? Perhaps not the inexorable, indisputable battalion in plain,
nameless blue and whites. We are the 8-4's and 7-6's, the survivors, the
"despite"s. We were those who were 50 seconds and 85 yards from death, and threw
it up to Robinson, and then did it again.

Survival: Accomplished.

Shortly after last year's Blue and White game we launched We
Are! 2013, a 100% independently published preview and feature magazine.
We didn't have the roster depth of other pubs, so we tried harder, played
smarter, and took the appropriate risks, holding the content to the kind of
standards we the internet obsessives would want to read.

Our business model

Because the Allen Robinson of fanbases plays for us, astonishingly, this
worked. So we've decided to try this "make-the-magazine-the-readers-want"
strategy again for 2014. This time, we're going for the touchdown.

What We Are

We Are! 2014 is a 112-page preview and feature magazine covering the
Penn State football team. The first half will be a position-by-position look
at the depth chart and the new staff, and then previews of all of PSU's
opponents, with generous portions of both advanced analysis and snark.
Examples:

Opponents preview

Positional previews

The second half of the book will be features by some of the most respected
authors in PSU media…and us. They include:

Lou Prato, the renowned Penn State historian will
commemorate the 20th anniversary of Penn State's most recent undefeated season,
with a first-person account of the highs and lows, from the demolition of
Minnesota to the Rose Bowl victory over Oregon.

Mike Poorman, veteran journalist of StateCollege.com and esteemed Penn State professor, will take us inside the life of a Penn State quarterback, with first-person accounts from current and past Nittany Lion signal callers.

Tim Tolley, recruiting guru of Fansided, VictoryBellRings
and State College's Centre County Gazette.

Ben Jones, program insider and Penn State beat writer for
StateCollege.com.

Seth Fisher, our publisher and the associate editor of
legendary Michigan site MGoBlog, will take a look at Big Ten and SEC coaching
hires since 1999 to see how Franklin compares to the field, and how the
conference's hiring practices have affected its national standing.

Last year we raised enough on Kickstarter to make a digital edition and
basically break even. If we can raise $13,000 we will write, produce, and
publish an entirely original, 112-page book for the 2014 season, and distribute
it digitally and DRM-free to all of our backers.

We also have a Stretch Goal of $28,000 to make
a Print edition and distribute that (in addition to the
digital copy) to the $20 "Something Blue OR Something White" backers and the $35 backers. Even if we don't hit our stretch goal, the 4TH AND GOAL ($100) and above backers will get a print copy regardless.

So if this Kickstarter hits $13,000 you will be charged what you contributed
and we'll make the book to distribute digitally; shirt-or-book orders will
receive the shirt. If we raise $28,000, the shirt-or-book orders will receive a
digital version as soon as it's ready, and we'll mail you the printed book as
soon as it can be distributed.

The T-Shirt

Quote taken from John U. Bacon's "Fourth and Long"

Used with permission from Mauti, Professor Bacon, and his publisher. Some of us wanted bullet holes on it but cooler heads prevailed; you are welcome to cut them out yourself. Anyway there didn't seem to be a better sentiment to capture what We Are today.

F.A.Q.

How will you know where to send my stuff/what size I am,
etc.? At the completion of this campaign, if our Kickstarter reaches
the $13k goal we will send a survey to the e-mail address you used for
Kickstarter. If you don't respond to that we'll continue bugging you on that
address. We will not give out your e-mail address to anyone except our
distribution partner, and we will not use it for anything except communication
about We Are! books and your other stuff.
Updates on this campaign and such will go there from Kickstarter; we'll make
sure to limit those to important things that have to do with kickstarting this book. Moral of the story: use the email
address you will respond to in a timely manner; spam will not be a problem.

If we don't reach the $13,000 goal we won't get your email. Kickstarter may
email you something to say we didn't reach the goal.

Will I be charged if you don't hit the $13,000 goal? No. The
way Kickstarter works is you don't get charged unless we hit our stated funding
goal. Kickstarter's FAQ explains this in more detail.

Will I be charged if you don't hit the $28,000 goal? Yes.
The way a "stretch goal" works is we promise to do something extra if we reach
it. In this case we would like to print-publish the book if we have enough
backers to not lose our shirts in doing so. Since that's a heady goal, we wanted
to make sure that you're getting something of equal value if we don't reach
it.

What if you hit the stretch goal but I want the t-shirt instead of
the book? There's an option for that. If we hit the stretch goal, backers of $35 and over are
getting both. When we ask you for your address/shirt size/etc. to send you your
stuff, you'll have an option to opt out from anything you like.

What if you hit the stretch goal and I decide I want both?
If time hasn't expired you can change your donation level. If time has
expired, we'll make some extra shirts available for purchase separately.

Who can see my payment info? Kickstarter works through
Amazon's system, so we never see your credit card info or the address you
supplied with it; that all goes through Amazon's secure payment system.

What's DRM and what did it ever do to make you hate it so?
"Digital Rights Management." These are actions taken by publishers to
make sure only people who bought the thing can read the thing. We understand why
they do this, but we also feel like every effective DRM platform does
more to devalue the product than protect sales.Often they
require you to download and their (janky) software in order to access the thing you bought, and limit the devices you can use that on.

We feel if you
bought a copy, you should be able to print it, put it on any device, read it in
whatever reader program you prefer, save it to your hard drive, or clip a page
out for future reference, etc. So we've chosen to leave DRM off the digital
copies and just ask that you not give it away because it was not-free for you,
and not-free for us to produce it. We'll put a password on a PDF but that's as
far as we'll go.

Where does the money go, and why is there a Wolverine in our Lions'
den? Well if we don't get funded there is no money--you only get
charged if we meet our goal. If we do get funded it goes to a bank account
started in February 2013 by our publisher expressly for this project. In the
future we'll have a corp set up to handle these for multiple blogs but that will
come after a few more of these get off the ground. The Wolverine is our
publisher, Seth, aka person we take endless pleasure in tormenting in re:
overtime field goal kicking and going for it on 4th down. See below.

Who We Are

Mike, Seth, Cari and Jared. Hello again. The inconsequential details:

The Editor in Chief is former PSU Blogging capo Mike
Pettigano (@MikePettigano), a 2006 graduate of Penn State’s College of
Communications and the John Curley Center for Sports Journalism, and a four-year
member of the Penn State Blue Band. A news reporter and editor since graduation,
he was one of the early sports bloggerati, starting up Zombie Nation in 2007. He
later brought together some of the best Penn State bloggers to create
Linebacker-U.com. He spent three seasons as a sideline photographer and managing
editor of Black Shoe Diaries through the end of the 2012 football season, and
also worked with Phil Steele. His writing has been cited by, among others, FOX
Sports, Sports Illustrated OnCampus, Sporting News Today, The Baltimore Sun, and
the Chicago Sun-Times. Mike has been the Associate Digital News Editor for The
Bergen Record (NorthJersey.com) since 2012.

Editor Cari Greene (@NotCarlotta) is the Managing Editor for
Black Shoe Diaries. After graduating PSU in 2003 with a degree in film, she
wallowed in the depths of retail management hell before getting a "real job"
that allowed her to actually, you know, attend PSU football games. Cari lives in
suburban Maryland, close enough to State College that she can make the trip
every weekend but far enough away to not be all post-graduate creepy. She also
really, really likes linebackers.

Editor Jared Slanina (@BSDtweet) is the other Managing
Editor for Black Shoe Diaries. Despite being a lifelong Ohio resident, Jared has
been a passionate and loyal Penn State fan throughout his life. He earned his
master's degree in journalism from Kent State University and currently resides
in Stow, Ohio, with his wife and two dogs. You can typically find Jared at
Beaver Stadium most Saturdays in the fall, or in his "man cave" where he has
three TVs set up to watch college football from noon until he drifts off
watching a Pac-12 game late at night.

Publisher Seth Fisher (@Misopogon), successfully published
three such books for MGoBlog and was in charge of all the behind-the-scenes
stuff for WA13 after approaching us about the concept. He also attended last
year's game, and is very sensitive about it, and this fact provides all sorts of
amusement for the staff during the long hours of making this book.

Risks and challenges

Well, we learned a few things from last year. The first is how our costs align; we ended up with very little profit once everyone was paid. We decided not to decrease the editorial budget at all since the content is the thing we are building this around, but we also want this to be more than a lot of time put into a good cause.

The second is our production system. We learned that most of the editing will happen once the stories are on the page, and that graphs and photos take as much time as the 1,000 (actually it's more like 250-500) words they're replacing. We had some superfluous steps last year when working with two page designers. This time we hope to streamline that process better by having the designers work more independently, with our lead designer Courtney providing templates instead of draft pages.

Getting editorial in is always going to be a hassle, since we can't really get all the previews done until they've had the Spring Games, and that's true also for the opponents and features that center on this season. We've worked to get the historical stuff done ahead of time and asked the feature writers to play a more active role in providing imagery for their articles. We also changed our editorial roles around so that writers in each section report to a specific editor rather than the whoever's-up system we used last year.

The greatest challenges remain reaching our funding goals--we are reaching higher than we got to last year--and, long-term, finding a newstand distributor who would like to get printed copies of We Are! in stores. We believe the best way to start is to prove there's a market for intelligent Penn State football content, and that starts right here.

FAQ

Rewards

Pledge $6 or more

SOMETHING BLUE (digital): A complete copy of the magazine as a PDF or in another e-format from which you can print to a PDF (no DRM).

Estimated delivery:Jul 2014

You selected

Pledge $16 or more

7 backers

SOMETHING WHITE: We send you the "Whoever's trying to kill me..." t-shirt (or last year's shirt if you prefer).

Estimated delivery:Jul 2014

Only ships to: United States

You selected

Pledge $20 or more

91 backers

SOMETHING BLUE OR SOMETHING WHITE: You get a digital copy as soon as it's ready, and if we hit our stretch goal of $28k, we send you a print copy.

If we don't hit the stretch goal, we send you the "Whoever's trying to kill me..." t-shirt instead.

Estimated delivery:Jul 2014

Only ships to: United States

You selected

Pledge $20 or more

77 backers

BLUE & WHITE COMBO: We send you an e-copy of the magazine plus the t-shirt.

Estimated delivery:Jul 2014

Only ships to: United States

You selected

Pledge $35 or more

117 backers

GOING FOR TWO: e-book and t-shirt either way, and a print copy if we hit our stretch goal. Also your name will appear in perpetuity on a special Thank-You blog post on Black Shoe Diaries.

Estimated delivery:Jul 2014

Only ships to: United States

You selected

Pledge $100 or more

45 backers

4TH AND GOAL: We send you the e-book as soon as it's ready, plus the t-shirt, and your own hard copy regardless of whether or not we hit the stretch goal.

And we will print your name on the Thank-You page within the magazine itself.

Estimated delivery:Jul 2014

Only ships to: United States

You selected

Pledge $250 or more

7 backers

OPINIONATED CAT IN A SCARF: All of the above, and an invitation to participate in this year's roundtable at the end of the book: You get to ask one question each for our editors to answer about this year's team. We reserve the right to mock you as we would each other.

Estimated delivery:Jul 2014

Only ships to: United States

You selected

Pledge $1,000 or more

0 backers

SYMBOL OF OUR BEST: Sponsorship. We dedicate a page to you and mention you in our promotions (blogs, ads, radio appearances). Also 4 t-shirts and 4 books, and the roundtable thing.

Estimated delivery:Jul 2014

Only ships to: United States

Funding period

Mar 31, 2014 - May 10, 2014
(40 days)

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